“Clarizen’s visibility ensures we’re working on the right things and resources are deployed where they can make the greatest difference.”

Anita Neuman Manager II, Project Management Boston Scientific

Company overview

Boston Scientific Corporation (BSC) transforms lives through innovative medical solutions that improve the health of patients around the world. As a global medical technology leader for more than 35 years, Boston Scientific “advances science for life” by providing a broad range of high performance solutions that address unmet patient needs and reduce the cost of healthcare. The company’s products and technologies are used to diagnose or treat a wide range of medical conditions, including heart, digestive, pulmonary, vascular, urological, women’s health and chronic pain conditions. Headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts, USA, Boston Scientific has a presence in more than 100 countries and employs more than 23,000 worldwide.

Boston Scientific’s San Francisco Bay Area operations includes its San Jose-based Cardiac Rhythm Management division, responsible for the development and manufacture of electrophysiology devices and its Fremont-based medical imaging division, which produces devices that provide a view inside the heart and coronary arteries. More information on Boston Scientific is available at //www.bostonscientific.com/en-US/home.html.

The challenge

Both BSC Bay Area operations include research and development, manufacturing, marketing, finance, information technology, human resources, capital equipment service and distribution. The two divisions rely on hundreds of ongoing and inter-related projects in order to meet product launch deadlines, provide new services, achieve quality goals and improve manufacturing operations.

For years, the Bay Area divisions relied on a siloed assortment of Microsoft and homegrown tools to manage projects, with varying levels of success. The lack of project management structure led to disconnected project lists, lack of visibility across projects and inefficient resource deployment.

The solution

Boston Scientific established a Bay Area project management office (PMO) in 2012 to help achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness. “Our project execution capability was limited by an absence of consistency and repeatability,” notes Anita Neuman, manager of BSC’s Bay Area project management office. “We lacked standardized tools and a standard reporting mechanism for project management.”

To overcome these challenges, the Bay Area PMO used the Clarizen free trial to conduct a successful month-long pilot test. The PMO test team conducted a mock project using sample project portfolios. “We had some concerns because we had not used a cloud-based application before,” Neuman says. “What we discovered was that using Clarizen in the cloud provided a lot of advantages in terms of overcoming our internal barriers. For instance, we did not have to buy or install software on several hundred devices.” Not only could Clarizen’s SaaS model help reduce implementation time and costs, but the team realized it would provide a standardized collaboration and project management solution that would eliminate their siloed, legacy tools.

The successful proof of concept led the PMO team to move directly to full implementation, which was carried out in two phases. The PMO team relied heavily on their Clarizen Customer Success Manager during phase one; less so in phase two as the team acquired greater familiarity with Clarizen capabilities and features.

Phase one of BSC’s Clarizen rollout focused on providing visibility across strategic project portfolios with an emphasis on governance, phase gates (e.g., investigate, candidate, active, complete), and a standardized template to support a variety of project types. Phase two focused on increased user adoption, pushing the standardized portfolio management approach deeper into the organization, deployment of Clarizen V6 and greater integration with legacy tools and processes.

Results

Clarizen has helped BSC project management teams achieve true visibility across multiple project portfolios and ensure that every project is directly tied to key business results. Many reports, for instance, that were previously produced manually are now built into the BSC’s Clarizen implementation and available to project managers via Clarizen widgets embedded in SharePoint, Excel and other tools.

In one case, the PMO team worked closely with its Clarizen Customer Success Manager to create a report using the Clarizen Excel Add-in to track operations time spent on new product development and cross charge that time to appropriate divisions such as R&D. The automation of manual time-tracking process is saving BSC one full FTE, amounting to a savings of more than $90,000 per year.

Clarizen widgets instilled in the PMO SharePoint portal also allow users to view portfolio content without logging in. The Excel add-in, embedded in the portal, provides dashboards that give executives up-to-minute project status on every portfolio item within Bay Area operations.

The cross-portfolio connections in Clarizen have helped eliminate surprises across different management teams by enabling them to avoid project delays due to lack of resource availability or other conflicts. The BSC PMO team recently implemented the meeting minutes app from the Clarizen Apps Marketplace. The free application turns meeting minutes into action items that then appear in Project, User Group and Discussion Group threads, enabling these items to be tracked like any other project task.

“Clarizen enables projects that originate in one portfolio to be linked to all portfolios where it will have an impact,” Neuman explains. “This type of visibility ensures that we are working on the right things and that our resources are deployed where they can make the greatest difference.”